How To Talk To Yourself

There’s an old joke that you’re not crazy if you talk to yourself. You’re only crazy if you reply.

But some recent research suggests it might actually be the other way around. People who talk at AND reply to themselves might actually be less stressed and more productive. You could say you’d be crazy not to talkto yourself.

The evidence comes from a team of researchersled by Jason Moser. The researchers asked participants to engage in some pretty negative experiences (viewing images in one study and recalling negative personal memories in the other) but while one group used first person pronouns (“I”) the other was instructed to use their name and speak in the third-person. The researchers then measured the effects of these experiences on the participants’ brains.

When they tabulated the results, the researchers found that participants in the third person group were consistently better at regulating emotions and exercising self-control. The working theory behind this finding is that talking to yourself in the third-person, as if you were talking to someone else, helps gain some psychological distance between the events and experiences and yourself. This self-distancing blunts the emotional toll the experiences take.

Their findings are in line with several studies that suggest third-person self-talk helps with a variety of…